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Meshing Developmental Evolution and Technology
Jerry23 writes "IT Conversations has free audio of a very provocative talk by futurist and developmental systems theorist, John Smart. He weaves a big-picture narrative featuring developmental evolution, technological acceleration, computational autonomy, the emergence and behavior of human social systems, why prediction has such a poor history, the unique growth properties of Information and Communication Technology and the limitations of biotech, finally culminating in his case for the inevitability of digital personality capture and a ubiquitous Linguistic User Interface. Among many other things, he asks 'What will Windows (and the Google Browser) of 2015 look like?'"
Forget what MS Windows and Google will look like in 2015. What will they look like in 2215?
For an answer read anything by Ian M Banks
...why prediction has such a poor history... Isn't his entire article basically a prediction?
Derive Politics
By 2015 the codebase will be so unstable that all M$ developers will have to gasp in horror, hold their breath for 15 minutes, and pray for the gods of software development to have mercy every time they commit a patch to the repository, lest Bill's children take away their pension for life.
Assuming that Windows is still around in 2015. To be honest, I don't think it will be at the rate it's going. Then again, that may just be wishful thinking on my part.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
all you have to do is spew meaningless bullshit? man. I've been doing that for years when can I get one of these futurist jobs?
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
effencity. If people get used to whats going on now it will be more "effencient". They might make something better, but the masses won't change to use it.
This is a good time as any to mention Vinge's Singularity. The main topic is AI, but he also talks about IA or Intelligence Amplification. The DM in the article is a type of IA for communications systems between people. It would merge the useful parts of online communications such as active logging without the problematic impersonal problems that are sometimes caused. This gets extended further when people are connected 24/7 and they have the ability to treat the real world and the wired world much more similarly
--
Want a free iPod?
Or try a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox. (you only need 4 referrals)
Wired article as proof
I'm still waiting for my robot wife!
There are way more UI's than XP/KDE/Gnome. What about the MacOSX UI? Or Enlightenment? or XFCE, the list goes on...
Most of us, as geeks, constantly jump on new technology, and most of the improvements seem incremental at the time, but when you lump 10 years worth of incremental improvements together, they are much more than we think they are now.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
Google Technological Singularity M or use the Wikipedia link. Speculating on anything after machine intelligences starts improving itself is futile. ETA 2060
Help fight continental drift.
Hopefully by 2015 there will be 'other' alternatives to windows.
Maybe the billion linux os' can get together and make everything seamless by then.
If not there will be Haiku OS.
One key breakthrough will be to give computers the ability to take an intentional stance (short definition or longer essay) with regard to users. If Google could infer why I am searching instead of just what I am searching, it would be able to do a much better job. This would move from search-as-data-retrieval to search-as-intelligent-dialog.
I'm not sure if this can happen by 2015, but it seems like a key goal that is much more important than adding "Genuine People Personalities" to computers
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I am quite excited by the confluence of advances in prize awards for technology advancement, and advances with the theory of compression. I'm convinced that if a substantial prize award can be created for dramatic advances in natural language text compression, it will lead directly to a solution to the most critical aspect of the "AI problem" -- that being the problem of the explosion of words without concomitant understanding. I had high hopes for the Internet being the new Gutenberg press leading to a new enlightenment but I'm concerned that without dramatic advances in AI to correlate the huge corpus being generated, the benefits of the new enlightenment may be too long in coming to save us from ourselves.
My work on a legislative proposal for fusion technology prizes was picked up by one of the founders of the Tokamak program. The more recent X-Prize award has a renewed the popularity of such prizes.
As a consequence I've been suggesting the creation of a new prize based on Kolmogorov complexity. As argued by Mahoney in "Text Compression as a Test for Artificial Intelligence":
"The Turing test for artificial intelligence is widely accepted, but is subjective, qualitative, non-repeatable, and difficult to implement. An alternative test without these drawbacks is to insert a machine's language model into a predictive encoder and compress a corpus of natural language text. A ratio of 1.3 bits per character or less indicates that the machine has AI."
A simple prize criterion would be for the first program producing a major natural language text corpus, with the size of the program being less than 1.3 bits per character of the produced corpus. Smaller intermediate prizes would help spur broader interest.
Seastead this.
What will Windows of 2015 look like?'
If history is any indication, it'll be a poorly implemented version of something mac users have been using since 2012. (I kid...only a little).
I'm still confused why people bring up how "hard" linux is to install, with having to install drivers for stuff! Windows certainly doesn't have device drivers for everything when you install it from scratch, nor does any other OS. Then the usual argument "well mom and grandma have to use it" are moms and grandmas installing Windows on their own? No. Why would you expect them to have to do that with Linux then? Ubuntu and numerous other distributions are becoming easier and easier to install.
If I am looking for information, I prefer the written word. I can read much faster than some person or simulated person can talk to me.
On the other hand, if I want to book an appointment, I prefer to deal with a secretary or simulated version thereof. "Can John meet with me next Tuesday morning." My simulated secretary talkes to his simulated secretary and the appointment is booked in both our books.
One of my retirement projects is to take an old crank phone, put a computer into it and have it act like an old time operator. Pick up the phone: "Operator", "Phone the bookmonger." "The bookmonger has changed it's now Deb Hill. I'm ringing her now." I don't have to see the operator's face. In fact I would prefer not to.
If you want to see what happens when you endow everything with a personality check out "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." I definitely don't need doors that thank me for using them!
This Developmental "Evolution" stuff is very much in doubt. I propose that people consider the concept of Developmental Creation Science.
Yes. It's the theory that much technological development was supernaturally begat by a Creator. The idea that man develops technology in an evolutionary manner is just absurd! Each of the major kinds of technology was created functionally complete from the beginning and did not "evolve" from some other kind of technology.
Oh, and I think kids should be taught this in school. It's time for them to stop thinking they can control anything. Just let go and let God (so if God intends for them to develop some form of new technology, he'll dump it in their lap. Until that time, they should just sit tight. Maybe take up macrame or watch more TV).
Oh yeah. Vote Republican and join the Pro-Life/Pro-War coalition: We take the hyp out of hypocrisy.
One massive virus, named meteor, will drive the dinosaur that is Microsoft Windows to extinction. It will seemlessly replace Windows XP with a copy of one of the many mature Linux distributions targeted at the desktop (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.). Microsoft's share of the desktop market will plummet to .2% in a matter of hours. Once the replacement is complete a message will be displayed to the user indicating that their PC has been liberated, and they will be informed of the Linux distribution and the desktop environment they are now using (Unbuntu Linux w/ Gnome for example). After 20 seconds they will be redirected to /. where they will immediately be subjected to someone posting a comment about how Gentoo is better than Ubuntu, or vice versa, and KDE is hands down better than Gnome. Enraged by the insult they will flame back calling the original poster and ass hat imbicile and although they have no idea what KDE is or how it compares with Gnome they're certain it sucks and if they ever do use it will only learn that they're original belief was true. And thus begins the successful entrenchment of Linux on the desktop. Only through the purity of a flamewar will the desktop be purged. 2007 cannot come soon enough. So sayeth the prophecies.
In a way, we do have our flying cars. It just turns out that most of us don't want/need/afford one parked in our driveway. A helicopter is essentially a flying car, but it's noisy, difficult to operate safely, and expensive to operate and maintain. Likewise, a jetliner is just a flying passenger train.
Nobody, including John Smart or Vernor Vinge, can make meaningful predictions any significant distance into the future. I think things are changing so fast now, that even 10-15 years into the future is almost inscrutable unless you're making very broad generalizations. You can say for sure: We'll have computers. They'll be real fast. But who knows what all we'll be doing with them.
Now with some good Intelligence Amplification, giving you the ability to consider the myriad variables and chart out many possibilities in future space, like a decision tree or a chess-playing program, and prune the unlikely ones, you can maybe construct a fuzzy map of the different courses the future will take. But you'll have to wait and see which one actually happens, just like everybody else.
Alright, I have to get back to brainwashing Jabberwacky ...
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
I don't see the problem with linux being ease of use so much as compatibility of software that people know and understand (e.g.: outlook, IE, Word). Sure, there are alternatives for Linux, but the method of acquisition is completely different. I can wander down to CompUSA and buy a new copy of windows, office, and Quicken all at the same time ... or, I can buy a new copy of RedHat, and ... download the applications to run on it? Installation is easy now for Linux itself. The problem is the apps, in my opinion.
Solve the problem of how to get a PC not only installed with Linux, but also easily installed with all of the apps the user needs ( -- easy as in, pop in a CD/DVD, hit OK and they configure themselves, regardless of which flavor of Linux you're using -- ) and making them easily accessible ( -- double-click from the desktop easy -- ) and Linux will truly be poised to take over.
I bet it will look pretty much the same as it does now.
in the future cheques will be spelled checks.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Dvorak is that you?
So much is poised for profoundly accelerating deep, wide and powerful change, there are much bigger questions about 2015 and beyond.
Technology, as Alvin Toffler, Verner Vinge, and ray Kurzweil have made the case, is self-accelerating. In an ever quickening loop, technology inherently accelerates in speed, magnitude and scope while dropping in cost.
That's because technology is driven by innovation, and the whole point of innovation is to find better ways to do things. If it isn't faster, more powerful, useful to more people, cheaper etc., it isn't any better. And so the speed, power and social effects of technological evolution, feeding on itself, ever accelerate.
The self evident logic in the above paragraph is simple to understand, but hard as hell to accept. The reality and implications of this short, simple text strains the imagination. But whether planning the future of a country, company or family, imagine we must, because a truly new global order will arise within this century.
Bigger questions such as what will *we* be like. How will the rise of superhuman computing intelligence change us? Will we laugh or cry? (Disclosure, the above link is from my article called: A Primer on Technological Evolution".
One things seems clear. We've got front row seats.
Ted
Thoughts on the Emergence of Computing Intelligence
.. es easy. The least proprietary technology always wins out. Not the prettiest, not the best designed or the most elloquent. Always the least proprietary.
That's how intel made it, that's how windows (ironically) made it, that's how the tcp/ip internet made it, and that's how linux is going to make it today and why it will simply kick butt.
2015, averaging right around oil peaking, with all its fun geopolitical and subsequent economic ramifications. I think the more pressing questions then will be, how am I going to eat today, than what google will look like.
I agree completely. The idea that GUIs (or OS's, for that matter) haven't changed that much kind of gives away the poster's lack of knowledge. On the surface, yes, there are still icons that you click on, with a helpful taskbar somewhere on the screen, windows and menus, etc. To use them, you click, double-click, right-click, etc. These aren't a lack of improvement, they are simply "what works", in the same manner that operating a vehicle hasn't changed much over the last few decades.
:)
That said, the previous implication that FOSS is just a copycat also shows that the poster wouldn't look beyond basic "expected" features even if they were highlighted. The X-windows system is stunningly capable and flexible, far beyond what Windows has to offer, which is why Apple has adopted it as well. (For the record, MS is about the only general-use OS company that doesn't use X-windows.) They could obtain it's qualities, write a desktop on top of it, and leapfrog MS's best efforts overnight.
Firefox, OpenOffice, Linux, etc., the list creativity goes on. Unfortunately, these kinds of posts still appear, and there's not much you can do, because even when you point out facts, they're more interested in starting an argument than investigating the truth for themselves.
So I'll shut up now.
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
maybe by 2015 i'll finally be able to erase all traces of M$ from my computer without having to bend over backwards.
-----
Check out the Uncyclopedia.org :
The only wiki source for politically incorrect non-information about things like Kitten Huffing and Pong! the Movie !
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
I don't remember reading the part where he claimed to be a bumbling top secret agent. :)
http://www.wouldyoubelieve.com/
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
Probably, but by then, they'll probably be whittling replacement parts out of used microwave ovens. :)
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
I don't know where you'd get the idea that I have a lack of knowledge? I work exclusivly with *nix servers at work doing both programming and system management. And to top it off I use linux and KDE on my desktop. So actually I've got a wealth of knowledge about the subject, thanks very much!
Basically you are the typical fanboi, anytime someone posts something contrary to your one true FOSS way, you call them naive or incompetent.
Sorry to piss in your cornflakes, but you're the one with the "lack of knowledge".
Cheers!
In 2015, Linux and BSD + KDE/GNOME would probably be commonplace on most desktops, and alternate operating systems such as Plan 9 and The Hurd will finally see the spotlight, in usages such as servers, research, or learning the innings of those systems. Mac OS X will probably be OS XI or OS XII, and it will probably be an operating system for those who want something better than KDE/GNOME, as well as those who love the seamless integration between Mac hardware and the Mac OS. Windows will still exist, for the same reasons why IBM mainframes with COBOL are still running in some places.
Finally, somebody will probably come out with a new OS that has exokernels and whatever operating system technologies in invented between now and 2015, who knows....
As I mentioned in another post, I just "went back" last week and used Windows 95. There was no rude awakening.
... the damn thing kept locking up! But the subject isn't about OS robustness.
Certainly it isn't fit to use for a day or two though
How many incremental improvements can you actually name?
- tabbed browsing
- ???
Sorry to piss in your cornflakes wow that made my day
This sig is false.
The whole idea of "layers" (h/w, OS, apps) is so backward.
:: Save As...)
I hope by 2015 it'll all become seamless (brain-Google, brain-Gmail, etc. interfaces) and that Windows and Linux will become OS of the old generation.
It's hard for me to understand why anyone would want to see any of the following (examples):
a) BIOS setup screen(s)
b) boot dialogue
c) login screen
d) Start menu (or its equivalents)
e) dial-up (xDSL or other) dialog box
f) traditional interfaces and menus (File
h) Internet/Networking setup
i) privacy and security options
j) OS
It will be absolutely absurd if any of these things existed in 2015. Why would anyone have to deal with any of that or even know what OS (if any) the computer runs on?
We'll by then have 100 times (or more) more computing power at our disposal. If we still use today's interfaces to access it, that would be pathetic.
"Relatively high" as in 90% of the desktop market, with XP's share growing at a rate of 1% a month, or ten times the growth of Linux. Operating Platform Statistics
Google browser written in python will run on your latest Apple iBorg brain augmentation, hacked to run up to date linux 2.10.x kernel instead of MacBrain OS. No retina projector will be required for recieving google ads, they will be pushed directly to /dev/eye/right neural uplink interface no matter if you are awake or sleeping.
For Windows, things will be different. Google will buy Microsoft in 2013, releasing full Windows XXL source code under one of the following Google Directory entries:
Final selection of the topic will be performed by Slashdot poll, which result of is unpredictable at the moment.
There you are, staring at me again.
I tend to think that it is quite possible Microsoft may eventually go a similar route than Apple have gone with OSX and build a new operating system on top of some *nix flavour. By 2015, Windows will most likely still be what you would expect Windows to look and feel like, but it may be an evolved .NET and Avalon/Aero on top of a *nix core with a POSIX API and a legacy Windows API for backwards compatibility.
Microsoft may step in and purchase SCO's software assets when SCO goes into liquidation and then use that as a base for their own *nix.
It is also possible that they eventually overcome their stubborn views on open source and use BSD to do their own *nix, released under some half hearted open source license that doesn't quite fit the requirements of what is commonly accepted as an open source license but still goes much further than their shared source thing today.
There are quite a number of reasons why they might do this. For one, it would allow them to do better in the PR battle. They could then say "Look, we are doing open source, too." and many parties, ie governments, anti-trust agencies, courts etc would just buy this regardless of how poor their license may be.
Another benefit for Microsoft would be that they don't have to spend as much effort on reinventing the wheel. If they have a POSIX compliant *nix core, they can take advantage of all the OSS code that's out there which now they often have to replicate. Yes, they want to dominate the market and use their OS as a leverage to do so, but they may just realise that in order to dominate, it is sufficient to dominate the most important APIs.
In my opinion, the battle over OSes will shift to a battle over APIs in the not so distant future. As APIs will become more important, the underlying core OS will become less of an issue, it may just become a commodity.
To illustrate this, consider the following scenario: Imagine, for argument's sake that GNUstep (http://www.gnustep.org) was to mature significant enough to take off and attract more and more application developers, first on top of Linux and BSD, later Solaris and eventually taking hold of Windows. Imagine, somehow the balance on Windows application development was to shift to OPENSTEP/GNUstep. This would allow developers to write applications that would run unmodified on all major desktop platforms. I am not saying that this is likely to happen, but if it was to happen, the effect would be that Microsoft would lose most if not all of the leverage they have right now.
Microsoft know this and that is why they fought such a bitter war with SUN Microsystems over Java on Windows, eventually abandoning Java and rolling their own.
All this goes to show that the APIs are more important for dominance than the underlying OS core and as a result, the OS core is therefore likely to become a commodity eventually. By 2015, the battle over OSes as we know them may have long become a thing of the past and the battle over APIs may be on.
the macintosh asterisk mailing list http://www.astm
I predict ruin,
at the hands of linux zealots.
With the fall of SCO and other proprietry formats M$ fell out of the solar system and off the radar, last spotted in a space ship flying Bill Gates' brain to the Cricket gate where he can take over the universe.
to answer the question, there will be no M$ in 2015.
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
Mom and grandma can't install windows and they know it. that is why these rinky-dink computr shops pop up all over the place like zits.
Windows just comes with the computer. They didn't have to install it then. They don't want to have to install it now. They don't want linux because it means installing it, not just changing from windows.
Frankly, I think installing Windows is harder. I have to have 4 bloody floppy disks, do all this weird shit, AND have a product key. THEN, I have to get the CD for my motherboard (finding it is always a chore). Then I have to install all that shit. BSD or Linux is just throw it in there and go. BSD install is half as painful tops. X configurations is the only place I ever fuck up. It used to be PPP... but then I realized I can't just copy out of the book the file... my ISP in those days used different prompts.
Anyway... Windows is a bitch to install and configure. Linux or BSD pretty much does itself. On the other hand, I don't have to make an XF86Config for Windows. Or a PPP config file (have broadband now anyway). Or any other kind of config file.
But then there are the viruses. and the spyware. and the virus and spyware checking.
Or I could make world or the kernel all the time, not have a very good word processor, have to type weird commands to use my floppy disk drive, et cetera.
The point is, computers suck. They are bothersome. Mom and grandma hate them even more. They might like being able to do some of the things they can with them but dont want to bother with the maintanence. Hell, I don';t even want to do it. It pisses me off. I've better things to do.
Thats right, you heard it here first, folks. Mom and grandma don't want to switch to Linux or BSD. They don't really care about "software freedom." They just want to look up a recipie or about baboons (or whatever). The computer is a tool, not an ends unto itself as it is for so many slashdotters. They really don't care. Why push linux on them? Seriously, why?
Linux was never ment to compete with Microsoft. GNU had more to do with competing with SUN than Microsoft. BSD wasn';t about competing with anything at all. All of a sudden "hey, jee-wiz, look what i can make my computer do, and it;s free, too!" turned into "kill microsoft!!" Who cares what Microsoft does? Honestly, I really don't think it actually affects our lives. Maybe the people here who have to support crappy buggy products. But I don;'t have a problem with Win2kPro. I don;t see it being crappy and buggy. And I don't care abot their business practices. I think Bill Gates is a dork, but that's irrelevent.
Honestly, mom and grandma dont care about any of it. But people around here often dont seem to see that. It's the same argument as "hacks build lousy end user interfaces 'cause they dont do that shit." Mom and granda would use Amiga if that's what was selling like hotcakes. They don't care. But change what they are used to and they will be pissed.
Welcome to Buzzword Bingo, I AM your host, John Smart. Can you spot the buzzwords?
Let's play!
accelerating change
I am just constantly suprised by new technological emergences
how do we socially interface with those
accelerating change
get in the zone
keep our eye on the ball
accelerating change
you can say this in the mirror every day
the future is now
it's already out there
a can-do, change-aware attitude
accelerating change
accelerating intelligence
intimacy of the human machine
evolutionary development - you're gonna hear this phrase a lot - anybody who uses this phrase thinks deeply about change
accelerating change
But seriously folks, that's about 5 minutes into an hour-long talk. Does this guy take himself seriously? Is he joking?
Smells like a leftover marketing plan from the Dot-com boom.
Just another proletarian malcontent.
and they shall call it HURD...
You may all be interested in the TaoRiver Futures wiki.
There's also another one developing, the WikiCities Futures wiki.
The idea is that by combining our understandings from our respective fields, we can attempt to better understand the possibilities open to us, and the timing and dependencies behind them.
Many other related wiki are listed on the Futures wiki WikiNode.
What will Windows 2015 look like?
(Wait for it...)
Mac OS 2010, duh!
Oh, yeah, forgot about the meat of the post, my bad.
:)
Tabbed browsing doesn't count (it was, more or less, Opera that popularized this). More directly, I was referring to incremental, sort of innovative ideas, like adding a translation option to the menu, third party extension capability that can be implemented in a few hours (try writing an extension for IE, it's fun), conveniences like being able to adjust browser fonts from the keyboard (instead of bouncing around the mouse when you just need the ability to change things quickly), and that's just a glimpse at an OS browser.
Linux's innovation is its nature. There is no other base code that runs on anything nearly the number of hardware platforms Linux runs on. As such, innovations come from areas far and wide, and granted, most of them mean little from a user's aspect. Still, a quick trip through a Linux kernel configuration is an eye-opener in itself. Claiming no innovation in Linux (a FOSS project) is a fool's errand, and that neglects some of the amazing things that have been accomplished at the code level.
Primarily though, it isn't "a program", or "an innovation" that drew my comment. It's the overarching, generalization that nothing offered up by anyone inside the FOSS world could possibly be worthy of credit. Money is nice, a well known company helps, but your idea that FOSS is copycat-only proves your ignorance for one simple reason:
People write software. Corporations sell it. Not the other way around. People create innovation, ideas. Corporations are chunks of property, physical or otherwise.
MS, Apple, SUN, etc., are corporations. They hire fine people. They pay them well, and because of that, those people are expected to provide new and innovative ideas. However, as Sony has proved time and time again, corporations have a vested interest in releasing innovation piecemeal, a little at a time, drawing in as much income as possible. There is nothing wrong with that.
However, there is nothing precluding a person, by themselves or in concert with others, from being innovative and contributing to a FOSS project. This is why your previous post consists of nothing more than pointless electrons wasting space on millions of monitors. (The physicists get it.)
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
After meteor hits, a parallel dimension will be opened up where Windows will flee and evolve into an advanced civilization run by a man named Koopa. He will turn a girl's father into slime and fall to the hands of two Italian guys in colored suspenders. There will also be an robotic Yoshi.
Best movie ever.
Substantive, yet the talk needs to be more organized and be less of a mindpuke.
Insinct is stronger than Upbringing - Irish Proverb
Hi /.,
t ml
:
.
For articles on the Linguistic User Interface see:
http://singularitywatch.com/lui.html
http://singularitywatch.com/promontorypoint.html
For more on Evolutionary Development:
http://singularitywatch.com/convergentevolution.h
If you find the topic of accelerating technological change fascinating and important you might enjoy our e-newsletter, Accelerating Times
http://accelerating.org/news/signup.php3
You might also wish to attend our annual fall conference at Stanford, Accelerating Change
Past conference public archives are at the website of our nonprofit, the Acceleration Studies Foundation:
http://accelerating.org/
We are still early in understanding our universal, cultural, and technological records of accelerating change, and this topic may be the most important and valuable one we could consider, as change and its opportunities may come faster every year forward for the rest of our lives.
We'd love any of you with interest in these fascinating topics to join our community.
Hope to meet some of you at Stanford in September.
Best,
John Smart
President, ASF
Ok let's think. Recently on /. we've seen about 3D displays. I bet that in 2015 they'll become a reality. And the media/internet will adapt.
..OK OK maybe i'm too far fetched and thought 20 years ahead. But hey, I like imagining the future, too! :)
We'll be searching for webpages in 3D, having a graph of relevant websites, and by pointing at them with your magic-wand/3D-mouse/whatever, you'll see a miniature snapshot of the website/mediasite. Press click (or even use your brain-machine interface to *think* click) and the website will appear.
After you finish browsing, you simply turn off your flat-panel 3D projector, unplug your computer-cube (which will be using nanotube chips - nearly zero energy consumption) which measures the size of a hand, tell the lights-on-the-wall to turn themselves off, and go to sleep.
>>"Among many other things, he asks 'What will Windows (and the Google Browser) of 2015 look like?'" See screenshots of "Windows Longhorn Beta"
God is real, unless declared integer.
I was expecting Smart to make a connection between LUI'S and Personality Capture, but if he did I missed it. It has to do with the notion that Natural Language Processing (which he pointed out is such a challenge) is naturally done by personalities. Okay, perhaps it is not a link with the "capture" part of Personality Capture, but we capture things now with computers. The link is with the "personality" part.
/.), along with visual processing so that it can experience walking see other things walking. Then when it hears references to "walk" it can make the connection.
." or something.
Language processing is based on life experience. In order for a neural net to learn language it must have inputs such that it can understand a concept such as "select", "walk", or "win." For a computer to understand "select" might be pretty easy. The trainer could say "I select a file" while he uses a mouse to select a file. The neural net could interface with that. But more sophisticated interfaces will be required to provide the nn with "context" for less computer-like concepts. We could put the nn into a robot that walks (like recently discussed on
(Yes, people who are unable to walk from infancy can speak intelligently about walking. Blind people can speak of and understand seeing. But those objections miss the point of a lack of "context input." As I understand it, a totally blind person does not know what "red" really is. (If I am misspeaking on this point, I apologize, especially to blind people or their close friends.))
Now consider this sentence, which is spelled phonetically:
"wonwonwonandwonwontoo"
Pretend that you heard it spoken instead of saw it written. The proficienct English speaker would realize several things. First, she would parse that into individual words:
"won won won and won won too"
Then she would do a lot of fast computation work to try different parts of speech for each word such that the sentence fits semantically and grammatically into rules of English. She might then write the sentence on paper as:
"One won one and one won two."
And that is enough for her to understand that the sentence is a fragment of a larger text, a newpaper report on the dog show or something. This is because the sentence has a lot of ellipses in it with anaphoric references being elided. Since references must be present, there must be more text associated with the sentence. With the references put back into the sentence it would read
"One person won one prize and one person won two prizes."
or "one dog won one bone . .
The proficient English speaker would not even be thinking about "anaphoric elliptical references." She would "just know."
All of these levels of computation go on in our brains constantly when we participate in all forms of communication. And in order for a LUI to work properly, the machine will also have to be able to do the same thing. Yet without other faculties (such as visual processing, mobility, etc.) these things can not be learned either. Hence, Linguistic User Interfaces and Personality emulation are intrinsically linked (and pretty darn tough).
the Dunedan
However, XP's growth is at the expense of Windows 2000, Windows 98, etc., but not Linux or Mac.
Overall, the percentage owned by Windows is (slowy) being widdled away by Linux and Mac.
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3-d virtual reality stereoscopic ultra-high resolution blue screens of death!
The AI singularity? Ain't. Gonna. Happen.
Why?
Because it doesn't have to.
People will simply move the line of "intelligence" down to some esoteric nonsense about "data compression" and "natural language" or some other load of obscure drivel, and the result will be the astounding discovery that the MacOS has been AWARE since got knows when it figured out how to spit out a blank floppy at start up, or a DVD player boots out a DVD when the movie is over or some other idiotic bit of trivial nonsense.
This is all cooked up by a bunch of AI geeks under the spell of Kurzweil, who should have stuck to making synthesizers.
The future doesn't belong to robots. It belongs to homo futuris.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
How about mobile phones? Wireless networking? PDA's? P2P? And this is only in our small field of ICT. 10 years ago nearly nobody had a mobile phone, now everyone and his dog has one. 10 years ago we were more or less bound to our boxes, now they are bound to us.
If we (buzzword warning!) extrapolate this 10 years into the future, I'd expect things like implated communication devices using ad-hoc mesh networks. The real changes of the last 10 years haven't been strictly related to computers or the Internet (which, I might remind you, was conceived in the 70's), but more to how/where we communicate and exchange data.
Naturally, you're right that we'll see the most advance in 'new' fields (as they didn't exist before, duh), however it's wrong to use the lack of change in one field to prove that change on a whole is slowing down. Besides, we may had Jurassic Park 10 years ago, but who could have imagined massive CG scenes like in RotK back then? I believe change is nearly always evolutionary, with once-in-a-lifetime revolutions.
This sig is intentionally left blank
I always love it when smart people "think" they know biology. They always assume that mammals are the pinnacle of evolution, and that man is the ultimate mammal. Two eyes better than many? Obvioulsy this guy has never actually looked at arthropods. Walking upright is the ultimate? Using that as a rule, his Troodont should have been the master. It did walk upright. Running aint everything. Pluse, Troodont and it's kin lasted for longer than the raptors. Not a fair comparison- the really bad day when a huge chunk of flaming rock wipes out 70% of all life on the planet makes all the "who is better" arguments literally go up in smoke. Why do we have two eyes? Bilateral symmetry does seem to be popular amoung terrestrial vetebrates. Not surprising, since all terestrial vertebrates are descendents of fish. Have not seen any fish with 3 fillets on em. I hate when people try and attach meaning and direction to evolution. Evolution direction. There is no anti-entropy going on, other that the usual eating/sleeping/procreating. Ask Flipper if walking upright is a requirement for sentince. I cannot comment on his views on computing, but he comes across as a poseur to this biologist.
Listen to this guy and cut through the jargon and you see a cultural viewpoint that is not shared by most of the world.
For instance, he says that everyone will WANT to live in cities - forgetting that most people want to get OUT of them, they are just forced to have to live close together by factors which don't continue into the future.
He says that energy won't be a problem because 'efficiency' will make the transport use of oil exponentially more efficient - ignoring the pollution problems from greater numbers of users in the third world swamping the pace of efficiency improvements.
He's ignoring the impact of real culture on technology and development. He ignores how individuals from different parts of the world will want to create different futures. Look at how Japanese culture shaped technology towards their interests, and out evolved the US. Look at how your inflight LCD screens have the option to show you the direction to Mecca.
I'll make a prediction: by 2010 the cultures east of the prime meridian will turn their backs on a future set out by american viewpoints, and chart a course which heads in a different direction.
Not only will we still be around, the The Amiga will be making a comeback!!!
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
Mod parent up.
If God manifested Himself to us here He would do so in the form of a spraycan advertised on TV. -- Philip K. Dick
Psst, I don't think anyone's noticed his name yet... sorry about that. ;-)
ID 871104 ... does that qualify as "Welcome to our newest member" John?
I hope you find enough here of interest to keep you sticking around awhile.
Warwick.
No. You can't look at my Sig; it's mine, and I'm not showing you.
That in all this furture gazing there has been no mention of Duke Nukem
I've heard rumors that 2015 will be the year of Linux on the desktop... Oh, wait.. nevermind.
I'm odd man out on this conversation, because I don't think human intelligence is computable, and I don't think we're likely to get things like universal constructors or technological singularities. Not for lack of enthusiasm, unfortunately.
But what strikes me in all the comments heretofore has been this idea of improving usability and efficiency by having the computer anticipate your actions, get to know you, listen in real language.
Well, I don't think this would at all be useful. I switched over to GNU/Linux two years ago on a lark, but I've stayed over because of the absolute richness of the toolset, especially textutils and text editors like vim--as I'm a writer, good text-manipulation is important.
These tools are generic, but precise. I have made my own toolchain to cope with the tasks I have to do each day. On Windows, I had Word. That's it--just Word. On Linux, I use awk, bash-scripting, perl, textutils, darcs, vim, (La)TeX and a host of others.
Having tools is where it's at. Better and more tools. Evolve tools and evolve toolchains.
Natural language is wonderful for human expression, but it's imprecise for detailed specification. Witness the development of mathematical notation, BNR notation, architectural schematics, UML. Programming languages aren't simply weird because it's easier to parse, but because their stilted format gives them predictable behavior. Real human language dips into and out of metaphor freely, invents neologisms, is imbued with dialect, invokes slang, and is more full than not of social and emotional content. Which makes writing stories really fun and easy, but is shit for writing programs--which, let's face it, are just automated tasks.
I don't want Windows Search to tweak my search based on the last fifty items I looked for; I *do* want to be able to tweak the Search myself so that it can bring up relavent text within the file, as well as strip some metainformation I myself added to it and display it. That's my idea of efficient.
Tenemus pyrobolos atqui jacimus cognitiones.
I think you miss the myriad of small little changes that happen. Just some of the examples you gave
Cars - performance/fuel consumption, the use of colour keyed plastic bumpers instead of chrome, windows glued in place instead of fasterned with rubber and chrome strip
Aircraft - Much bigger, with ability to fly further, automatic navigation (actually at a price that individuals can afford)
When you living amidst these small changes, you don't notice (think frog not jumping out of heating water before it boils him to death)
Abstracting their prize criterion:
Previous record: X
New record: X+Y
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z x (Y/(X+Y))
Applying this to Kolmogorov complexity (ignoring several technical details for the moment):
S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program producing uncompressed corpus
M = S/P
Anytime someone demonstrates a larger M, they are awarded money according to the abstract prize criterion above.
The only problem with it is that it doesn't include Mahoney's threshold of 1.3 bits per character for artificial intelligence.
Seastead this.
"Publish or perish" produces precisely the explosion of words that creates the lack of understanding between people/disciplines. Academia just doesn't have the right incentives.
The real problem with intellectual property is that no one but the acquisitive can afford the lawyers that it takes to defend the royalty stream that should arise from it -- so we're beig inundated by pseudo-"inventors" who are really just tax collectors --thus destroying technological civilization's foundation.
I had a legislative proposal to fix that problem back in 1992 when I was doing technology politics, but the lock-down by acquisitors on politics is so tremendous I gave up on a "free market" approach, as well as academic approach to these problems. The only way around this stuff is creating new tools -- prize awards for technology is a good approach.
You're right that in the case of the X-Prize criterion, it was set up to favor simply throwing money at a reasonable technician -- but if the altitude goal had been set to 200km instead of 100km, John Carmack's team would likely have beat Paul Allen's team and done so on about 10% of Allen's investment.
Seastead this.
I think this is the first plausible criterion for AI I've seen outside the Turing test (not that I've been looking too hard).
My question is, now that we have the test, what do we use it for? What difference would it make whether a computational system "has AI"? Does it have legal implications? How differently should it be treated, and why? Is it just a PR buzzword?
Passing the Turing test has (almost too obvious) consequences, not because its a test for intelligence, but a test for human likeness, extrapolated from the (at times dubious) assumption that humans are intelligent. Your considerably more technical criterion does not carry this grave subtext, so it's necessary to explain it.
This penetrates all aspects of knowledge and society.
Quality information helps us simplify our world view without making it less accurate -- or conversely -- make our world view more accurate without making it more complicated.
It is sort of a power tool for philosophers.
Seastead this.
Much as I hate Windows, I don't see it going extinct in a mere two years.
Maybe when people see what a dog Longhorn is, they will START to go extinct then, but there's no way you can convert hundreds of millions of people from Windows to Linux in two years. Totally impossible.
What is likely to happen is more of the same - Linux will make continual slow - and increasing - inroads on the server and desktop markets until it has approximately 25% of the market (first in servers, then on the desktop) - at which point the "tipping point" will occur and Windows will start to lose market share big time. I estimate this will take another ten years.
However, I did predict the demise of IBM many years ago - and then they surprised me by actually supporting open source and changing enough to keep their relevance to the industry.
However, since Microsoft is totally run by Bill Gates, unless he gets hit by a truck or Osama drops a plane on him, I don't see Microsoft being able to change its tune the way a corporation like IBM - run by changing CEOS - can.
Of course, I suppose it's possible that once Bill sees his income dropping (since that is absolutely all that matters to him), he may panic and actually change.
Naah...No way. He's too big an asshole.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Irrelevant.
Technology marches on - and will inevitably lead to developments (regardless of source) that will lead to a Singularity - or at least the sort of developments we Transhumans intend.
The Taoists were into immortality, too, so your Asian analogy doesn't hold there, either.
There are plenty of Japanese futurists, if you haven't looked.
Where this guy probably goes wrong (I haven't read everything yet) is he probably describes certain future circumstances which in reality other advances will make obsolete. Drexler warned against this in "Engines of Creation" while deliberately doing it himself.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
And, as with people, when it gets it wrong it's worse than if it was just a dumb but obedient tool
This is so very true. I suspect that primitive (= worse than useless) incarnations of the intentional stance were built into much maligned "intelligent assistants" such as Microsoft Office's Clippy. Perhaps one of the needed breakthroughs is some type of internal feedback -- if the "smart" software notices that it is getting things wrong too often, it will turn itself off or revert to "dumb" settings. When the software notices that the user's behavior has become more predictable, it might attempt to interact more.
I totally agree that the worst possible trait in a computer is unpredictability. The computer should never grab control from the user or behave in non-obvious ways. Rather, a competent "smart" system would earn the user's trust and the user would choose to delegate more tasks to the automated system. I can imagine a background interface that lets the computer signal when it thinks it knows what is next and whether it got it right. The UI would offer several modes that: 1) let the user take full control when doing hard-to-anticipate activities, 2) run with a mix of user-input and automated task completion, 3) run semi-automated with light oversight, and 4) run near-fully automated for longer batch jobs (with post-task QA).
Again, I fear that this will take far longer than 10 years to perfect and unless its near perfect, it will not be accepted for the reasons you allude to.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Think about the Rosetta Stone in terms of compression. You have a single message represented in 3 different languages. Now imagine a huge Rosetta Library -- the same library represented in 3 different languages. Clearly, optimal compression of this Rosetta Library is going entail precisely the "conceptual processing" you desire.
Seastead this.
There are actually two pieces to this question:
Kolmogorov compression is defined in terms of the minimal bit string (usually as program running on a Turing-complete machine) it takes to describe another bit string. In order verify a contestant has won some increment of the K-Prize, it would be necessary to make his minimal bit string public so that anyone could "execute" the description to produce the original corpus.
This would produce the valuable result that the language model he is using would be published. The language model itself is very valuable since it contains the model, not just of the language, but of the conceptual world represented by the corpus. This model would be very valuable -- particularly as it began to exceed normal human capabilities to compress the corpus -- for it would contain many novel and quantifiably valuable philosophical, scientific and practical concepts.
The program used to compress the corpus might be very valuable as well or it might be just the "dictionary" of concepts used to compress the corpus. An example of the former is given by some work with advanced inductive logic programming systems that invent predicates. An example of the latter is given by the approach Cycorp has taken for 2 decades (without much success yet) where they hire a bunch of philosophers to describe, in a variety of "microtheories", various aspects of "common sense".
Lately Cycorp has, very wisely, given up the ghost with the idea of having really smart humans try to produce all the concepts and has started using some predicate invention logic.
So very soon now I predict there will be some very profound breakthroughs -- if for no other reason than the long dark ages of AI, where high priests are relied upon for all wisdom, are terminally ill and recognized as such by the high-priests of the "church" of AI.
For that reason I think it wise to demand that the compression algorithm be made public.
Seastead this.
Basically you are right - except that some things are much older than people usually know. I had a cell phone -82 - and hate them even today, no privacy, no family life if you are in computer business. Wireless - at that time supporting wireless devices for customs, etc.. So - not so new. What is in news or what is given to public is often old - the gov/mil world is often way ahead - years! It will not change - so, let's hope 2015 is better not worse. By the way - how old is the metric system, 100 years, 1000 years, older ?
http://www.newpath4.com/formulaeperpetual_perpetua ltimeperpetualspaceperpetualpowerperpetualmomentum perpetualmotion_3plus4equals5.gif or if that doesn't work use this one: http://tinyurl.com/4sjmu .
Flying cars and non-propulsion transtellar ships both use the same engine... an Engine that doesn't use fuel; it IS the fuel. -Riley 3/28/2005